But something else was carried to him on the wind, something that affected the wizard almost as strongly as the scent of burning: the cries, screams and prayers of desperate people, suffused with the shouts and invocations of their attackers.
Gerhart quickened his pace down the hillside.
Once he reached the outskirts of the village, he could see figures moving through the obscuring smoke. They were shadowy and indistinct, and although he could not make out the appearance of individuals he could read quite clearly what was going on by their desperate movements. Many were running in panic, others following on their heels with what appeared to be more measured steps.
Gerhart realised that the panicked villagers were being herded into the centre of the village to where another fire, larger than the others, was blazing.
The smoke drifting from the other conflagrations had at first hidden this fire from him. As another cloud of smoke drifted clear of the village Gerhart saw that part of the stockade enclosing the buildings had been uprooted to fuel the fire, along with the wood and straw pillaged from a ruined barn.
Gerhart guessed that the smaller bonfires burning on the outskirts of the village had been lit to purify the air of the invisible, malignant contagion that was the plague. But this much larger conflagration, burning at its heart, had a much more sinister purpose, he was sure.
Suddenly a woman ran across the space between two houses, her hair and torn dress flapping around her. She was pursued by a man wearing a monk-like habit who was waving a spike ended flail over his head.
Gerhart passed under a signpost, a plaque of wood hanging by chains creaking in the slight breeze. He looked up and read the name recorded there in faded and peeled paint, in an angular gothic hand: Grunhafen.
With no one on guard at the southern gate leading into Grunhafen, Gerhart was able to walk into the village unhindered. He could hear the buzzing of flies in the air. Figures ran towards him out of the coiling smoke, gaunt faces distorted by screams, streaming with tears of terror, or hidden by deep hoods and sinister leather masks. Then they were gone again, swallowed up by the thick bonfire smoke.
One robed thickset man charged at him bellowing, but came to an abrupt halt as Gerhart swung his staff sharply into his stomach. As the fanatic collapsed, winded, onto his knees, Gerhart saw quite clearly the angular embroidered “S” on the front of his robes. It was the same with the others among the pursuers. They were zealots; men of Sigmar.
“What is going on here?” the fire mage muttered.
Ignoring the cat and mouse games of the villagers and their aggressors, Gerhart strode into the all-enveloping acrid clouds, making his way towards the centre of the village. It was there, he was certain, that his questions would be answered.
The darker grey shapes of gable-ends loomed at him out of the murk, increasing the sense of claustrophobia that the choking smoke had already laid over the place. Then the shadowy ghosts of the streets disappeared and Gerhart was standing in the middle of the village, the heat from the bonfire prickling his face.
It was not as hot as he might have expected, for standing around the blaze was a cordon of zealots. Gerhart took them all in with a disapproving glance. Some wore hooded habits, whilst others wore the clothes of commoners. Some had shaved their heads, as was the way of many who joined the priesthood of Sigmar, but others had allowed their hair and beards to grow into thick, unkempt manes.
They all sported some kind of symbol or icon of the Heldenhammer. And they all had the haunted look of desperate men—men who had suffered such hardship and tragedy in their lives that they now had nothing to live for but their faith and the persecution of the sinful.
They were all armed, and one matted-hair individual was using the knotted whip he was carrying on himself. He beat his back repeatedly over first one shoulder and then the other, his unintelligible mutterings punctuated by sharp intakes of breath or impulsive gasps of pain.
“Flagellants and fanatics,” Gerhart growled. “Madmen all.”
“Who is this sinner?” a voice, loud and clear as a cannon shot, demanded over the crackling of the bonfire.
Gerhart turned to see a dishevelled, rag-robed figure pointing at him. The flesh of the man’s outstretched arm was scabrous and coloured a sickly green-grey. He had obviously once been dressed the same way as the other flagellants, in a tunic embroidered with the golden twin-tailed comet of Sigmar, but his habit was now torn and stained, looking more like a burial shroud.
The speaker was surrounded by four hulking figures that, although dressed like holy men, had the build and stance of bodyguards.
Despite being a whole head shorter than the hulking Sigmarites surrounding him, the man had an air of authority that distinguished him as their leader.
Close to the man, Gerhart gagged on the sickly sweet smell of decay. Was this because he was at the heart of another damned settlement that had fallen prey to the plague or was the smell coming from the bandage-bound figure in front of him, he wondered?
The wizard could not see the man’s face. Under the pulled up hood of the habit the zealots’ leader wore a shaped leather mask, stained almost black, which gave him a leering, almost daemonic, expression. Stuffed into a cracked leather belt at his waist was a scourging whip, its several knotted lengths of leather embedded with cruel barbs and spikes.
The wizard did not bother to hide his revulsion.
When the leader of the zealots spoke again, Gerhart was certain that the gagging stench was emanating from the diseased man.
“I say again, what sinner is this who would interrupt our holy work? Why has he not been judged? Seize him!”
“I too could ask who you are,” Gerhart retaliated. “What are you doing here, and what are you doing to these people?”
Suddenly Gerhart found him surrounded by half a dozen Sigmarite zealots, some of them abandoning their position at the fire, others emerging out of the coiling ash-flecked smoke.
He brought his staff up before him in both hands but the fanatics were on him, batting aside the wizard’s oaken rod with swipes of iron-banded maces. Gerhart received two sharp blows from the haft-end of a pole arm. Something blunt and heavy smacked into his ribs from behind. Startled, and gasping for breath, he felt rough hands grab him.
Gerhart could feel Aqshy’s energies surging into him, drawn at first by the bonfires, visible to his mage-sight as coruscating ribbons of scarlet energy and fluctuating crimson light. But it was a source of power that he was unable to tap, his arms were being held firmly at his sides, and his staff had been wrested from his grip by one of the zealot thugs. Another man scrabbled at Gerhart’s scabbarded sword and, after some struggling, managed to pull it free.
Without his weapons and so his powers of sorcery, Gerhart had nothing left but his temper.
“Do you not know who I am?”
“Why, should I?” the leader sneered.
“I am a renowned wizard of the Bright college of magic in Altdorf!” Gerhart declared, pulling himself up to his full height.
“Ah, so you are one of those who would bring ruin to our great nation by consorting with the powers of darkness!” It was not a question; the man had already made his judgement. “All those who play with fire end up getting burned,” he said, half-turning to the raging bonfire behind him.
What was the man talking about, Gerhart asked himself? He was talking and behaving like a fanatica follower of Sigmar, but his physical appearance was enough to make any rational man suspect the monk was not all he proclaimed to be.
How could the man be so unaware of his own condition, unless it was not only his body that had been corrupted but his mind as well?
“Curse you for a damned fool!” Gerhart growled. “Do you believe you are doing Sigmar’s work here?”
“Have you not seen the signs?” the leader wailed. “The End Times are upon us! The servants of Chaos are at large in the world and if the light of Sigmar’s truth is to shine through the darkness we must light the way wi
th the burning bodies of his enemies!”
Gerhart considered the evil signs he had already seen abroad in the land, the two-headed foal at the isolated farm in Stosten, the still-born spider-legged baby in Avenhoff, the rain of fish in Vlatch, the leering green-tinged face of the second moon as it traversed the sky, and now the sickness afflicting the very Sigmarite zealots who would rid Ostland of the plague.
Maybe this truly was the beginning of the prophesied End Times?
A sharply raised eyebrow was the only indication Gerhart made that he considered there to be anything amiss, the rest of his face an inscrutable mask.
There was a definite miasma of disease and decay in the air. A zealot shoved a moaning villager past him. Although Gerhart was no physician, the so-called plague victim appeared to have little obviously wrong with him. The warrior priest wondered if the same held true for the other people the zealots were rounding up and throwing into the flames of the growing funeral pyre?
By contrast to the villagers, these fanatical Sigmarites had definitely contracted the disease at some stage, possibly whilst carrying out their holy work. Fat, hairy bluebottles buzzed around the holy men, whose skin was blistered with buboes and weeping ulcers. Their faces—those that he could see were drawn and gaunt, with great coal rings around sunken, red-rimmed eyes. And these signs of sickness were no greater than around the rag-shrouded, flagellant monk himself.
Outnumbered and alone, Gerhart knew that he had to save himself and get out of this village before he too became caught up in this madness. And he had to do so now.
“You have been in contact with the diseased. Could it be that you too have succumbed to this vile sickness?” Gerhart challenged the monk.
“No!” the leader yelled, clearly unaware of his own corrupted condition. “We are carrying out holy work, the sacred mission given to us by Sigmar himself in a vision of glory.”
“And what is that mission?”
“Can you not see?” the Sigmarites’ leader said, indicating a huddle of terrified villagers being held by yet more of his sinister followers. “These creatures are the servants of Nurgle!” Gerhart felt his stomach lurch at hearing the plague god’s true name. “They bear the stigmata of the Lord of Decay’s chosen ones. While they live to spread their master’s filth and corruption, the carrion lord grows fat and bloated on the souls of the innocent and his dark power swells in the world, like a cadaver swelling with corpse gases.”
Gerhart couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Everything he had seen in Grunhafen suggested that it was the villagers who were the innocent ones and the Sigmarite host, blind to the truth, who had been corrupted by the Lord of Decay.
Look at them, thought the wizard. Look how unhealthy they all are!
As if to affirm Gerhart’s observations, one of the zealots broke into a hacking cough.
“How dare you make such accusations? Enough of this! It is you who are the evil ones! And it is you who must be judged!”
At that, Gerhart stamped down hard on the foot of one of the zealots holding him. In shock and pain the man let go of him and took a limping hop backwards. With one arm free, Gerhart took a swing at the second of his captors. His fist punched into the brute’s sternum causing the man to stagger back winded. Gerhart pulled himself free of the man’s weakened grip and snatched his staff back.
In two bounds Gerhart was on the leader. Even though the thought of getting closer to the diseased zealot filled him with revulsion it had to be done. Desperate times made men do desperate things.
As the monk raised his ulcerated hands to fend off the wizard, Gerhart swung his staff upwards, skilfully connecting with the man’s leather mask and knocking it from his face.
As the Sigmarites closed on Gerhart to defend their master again he shouted, “Look at your leader! Look at what he truly is!”
So full of authority was the wizard’s voice that the closest zealots turned their eyes upon the ruin of their leader’s face. The man’s cheeks and forehead were ravaged and hollow with pockmarks. He had no nose left, just a gaping hole in the front of his face through which rotting bone and cartilage could be seen. His lips were fleshless and drawn, and as the leper screamed, Gerhart saw that the man’s gums were bleeding and pulled back from brown, cracked teeth. On the man’s right temple, three large, weeping buboes, were clumped together, green-yellow pus oozing from them and crusting on his veiny skin.
Gerhart could hear no gasps of revulsion or horror from the fanatics. Surely such a sight would drive zealots to either slay their master or abandon him as their leader?
“Are you all mad? Look at your master!” the wizard exclaimed again.
Still no one moved.
Still screaming hysterically, the leper was scrabbling in the dirt to recover his mask.
Gerhart was amazed. In spite of everything, part of the leper’s ruined mind must have realised that his appearance was abhorrent and had to be hidden from view. But still his devoted followers could not see the corruption before their very eyes.
Gerhart was suddenly aware that the buzzing of the flies had increased in intensity, as if the insects had become enraged. Then they were swarming at him in a great black cloud.
Picturing the flame burning within his mind and observing the flow of magic around the blazing pyre with his wizard-sight, Gerhart reached out with his mind and pulled a snaking tendril of orange-red energy from the air.
A cone of fire burst from the outstretched fingertips of his right hand as he thrust it towards the furious swarm. The roar of the flames drowned the buzzing of the flies as Gerhart’s spell immolated their tiny black bodies.
Then the plague-bearing doom-mongers ran at him, armed with all manner of weapons, from pitchforks and worn blades to pole-arms and even the whips they used to mortify their own flesh.
Gerhart’s hands began to make signs of conjuration as if he could draw on the hot, dry wind of Aqshy into himself. Surrounded by the fires of Grunhafen, and suffused with the power of the four primal elements, Gerhart could barely contain the energies welling up inside him like magma bubbling up within the heart of a volcano.
This was nothing like the struggle he had faced atop the Tower of Heaven, battling the astromancer Kozma Himmlisch. Now the spells came easily to him, with little need to truly focus his mind. He raised his hands once more and thrust them towards the approaching circle of zealots.
He had been on the verge of losing his temper and now that he was freed of their clutches he was able to release his pent-up rage in an eruption of flame. The spell burst from his hands with an animalistic roar. It was as if the flames were alive, raging and hungry like some feral beast.
Half a dozen Sigmarites fell back screaming as their heavy robes caught fire. Two of the men who had managed to retain their senses flung themselves to the ground and rolled over and over to put out the flames. Gerhart was aware of a wild-haired flagellant smacking at flames in his beard with burning hands; his high-pitched screams cut through the air in an agonised wail.
Gerhart turned his furious gaze on the man still holding his sword. To the terrified Sigmarite it seemed that the wizard’s eyes were aflame. Gerhart didn’t need to give the man another demonstration of his power. The zealot cast the sword before him, turned tail and fled.
Armed with his sword, staff and spells, Gerhart could now launch himself fully against the plague-corrupted zealots. But the wizard was still aware of the huge numbers of fanatics he had to face alone. He would never be able to defeat them all, he had to decide whether to make a stand or try to escape.
And then, as if in answer to an unspoken prayer, he heard pounding hooves and gruff shouts from the other side of the village square. Keeping the fanatics closest to him at bay with another blast of fiery magic, Gerhart looked through the white hot flames to see six black-clad figures riding into the thick of the diseased Sigmarites and cutting them down with bloodied swords.
Chaos and confusion reigned. The leper was screaming orders to his devote
es exhorting them to kill those who would stop them from completing their holy work. Villagers ran screaming from their captors as the Sigmarites fought back against the new arrivals. Some braver individuals tried to cut down the wizard.
It was clear who the leader of the warband was: a man, tall in the saddle, wearing a high broad-brimmed black hat and holding a silver flintlock pistol. Gerhart had encountered his like before.
The man rode towards him, taking aim. For a moment doubt flickered through Gerhart’s mind and the flame in his mind’s eye sputtered. He clearly heard the report of the pistol firing and saw the puff of blue smoke wreath its muzzle. A split second later he heard a choked cry behind him. He turned to see a Sigmarite, chain-flail above his head, fall backwards into the fire, with a ragged red hole in his throat.
Gerhart felt he should offer some words of thanks when he heard the horseman say, “Caught in the act.”
Before he could turn again something heavy connected with the back of his head and Gerhart’s world exploded into darkness.
Before the sorcerer could slump unconscious from the coshing he had been dealt by the butt of his pistol, Gottfried Verdammen slung an arm under his shoulders and pulled him up onto the back of his panting steed. The horse barely slowed as he did so.
Having recovered after the warband’s surprise attack, the crazed zealots were now running at the witch hunter and his henchmen, slashing at their steeds as well as the riders. Verdammen’s men rained hacking blows down on the plague monks in an attempt to keep them at bay.
“We are done here!” Verdammen shouted to his party. “We have what we came for. Ride on!”
Kicking his heels into his mount’s flanks, Verdammen urged his stallion forward. As he did so the animal reared up and crushed the bald, blistered head of a Sigmarite heretic under its iron-shod hooves.
[Warhammer] - Magestorm Page 5
